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Word Frequency in Classic Novels

Use web scraping and NLP to find the most frequent words in one of two pieces of classic literature: Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick, or Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie.

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9 Tasks1,500 XP

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Project Description

In this Project, you'll scrape a novel from the website Project Gutenberg (which contains a large corpus of books) using the Python package requests. Then you'll extract words from this web data using BeautifulSoup. Finally, we'll dive into analyzing the distribution of words using the Natural Language ToolKit (nltk).

The natural language processing tools used here apply to much of the data that data scientists encounter as a vast proportion of the world's data is unstructured data and includes a great deal of text. To complete this Project, you need to know how to import web data into Python and how to work with natural language text.

Project Tasks

  1. 1
    Tools for text processing
  2. 2
    Request Moby Dick
  3. 3
    Get the text from the HTML
  4. 4
    Extract the words
  5. 5
    Make the words lowercase
  6. 6
    Load in stop words
  7. 7
    Remove stop words in Moby Dick
  8. 8
    We have the answer
  9. 9
    The most common word

Technologies

Python Python

Hugo Bowne-Anderson HeadshotHugo Bowne-Anderson

Data Scientist

Hugo is a data scientist, educator, writer and podcaster formerly at DataCamp. His main interests are promoting data & AI literacy, helping to spread data skills through organizations and society and doing amateur stand up comedy in NYC. If you want to know what he likes to talk about, definitely check out DataFramed, the DataCamp podcast, which he hosted and produced.
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